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I'm going to do some writing about discrete probability theory. Probability is an extremely important area of math. We encounter aspects of it every day. It's also a very poorly understood area - it's one that we see abused or just fouled up every day. I'm going to focus on discrete probability theory. What that [...]
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A fun game to play with cranks is: how long does it take for the crank to contradict themselves? When you're looking at a good example of crankery, it's full of errors. But for this game, it's not enough to just find an error. What we want is for them to say something so wrong [...]
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Imagine, for just a moment, that you were one a group of scientists that had proven the most important, the most profound, the most utterly amazing scientific discovery of all time. Where would you publish it? Maybe Nature? Science? Or maybe you'd prefer to go open-access, and go with PLOS ONE? Or more mainstream, and [...]
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A couple of weeks ago, there was a bunch of news about a major DOS attack on Spamhaus. Spamhaus is an online service that maintains a blacklist of mail servers that are known for propagating spam. I've been getting questions about what a DoS attack is, and more specifically what a "DNS amplification attack" (the [...]
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I've been watching the whole Adria Richards fiasco with a sense of horror and disgust. I'm finally going to say something, but for the most part, it's going to be indirect. See, I'm a white guy, born as a member of an upper middle class white family. That means that I'm awfully lucky. I'm part [...]
